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Sunday, January 26, 2014

Getting a 4 year old to eat vegetables: trickery!

Don't judge me ... I'll just start with that. Our boys aren't ones for exploring with food. Wilson continues on a kick of just white food (bread, pasta, you get the picture) and sweets (fruit, muffins, and many requests for lollipops). Cole continues to dabble with new foods (1 lettuce leaf, 1 slice of tomato, etc.). But the boys are far from getting all their food groups unless they can be sweetly baked into a pastry. We've tried it all: "Kindergarteners need to eat vegetables." "You'll get taller / faster / smarter with a carrot and some kale." They don't believe us.

We even tried letting the boys know that real astronauts eat greens. Still bites only at best.

Last night for dinner my mom made an incredible white bean soup with white beans, pork, carrots, leaks, potatoes, yellow beets, celery, and kale. Cold weather heaven in a bowl. The boys sat down and proceeded to eat bread ... only. So I decided to re-test the previously blogged about ReSqueeze pouches ... and it worked! 6 oz of purred white bean and veg soup gone. I feel like quite an accomplished mom now, even though I cheated a little. Some day I'll get to the point that the boys only eat what we cook (and how we cook it) but for now I'm good with the fact that they ate real food.

Here's what we did ... started with the fresh home-made white bean soup:

Busted out our old babycook (yes, we should have retired this when the boys hit 2 ... but I un-dug this from our moving boxes (from 2 years ago)). Pureed. Scooped the soup in the pouches. and BAM. Eating (drinking / squeezing) success.

I'm not planning to make these a regular appearance at the dinner table, but for an experiment I'm pretty proud of our little slurpable soup success.